


the genetics of rage (are unforgiving)

by SearchingforSerendipity



Series: pjo crossovers: the ichor and gold series [2]
Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Incredible Hulk - All Media Types
Genre: Crossover, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-07 18:02:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8810710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SearchingforSerendipity/pseuds/SearchingforSerendipity
Summary: It is wrong to say that all of Ares' children are senseless brutes. All of them had a taste for violence, a hunger in their bones that longed to maim and fight. How they went about taming this violent delights varied. Clarisse LaRue bullied and ached and learned. Peggy Carter wore army uniforms when there weren't any tailored for women and put a fist or a bullet, a long liet of indisputable victories on the face of anyone that doubted her place in the front lines.Bruce Banner hid the anger better, tamed it and honed it. It was a misdgustment and sheer blindness to think that he could ever eradicate it.





	

  
_**i**_ No one ever tells Bruce about his father. All his life that title will go to Robert Banner's voice and fists and tomb. Some seeds are stronger than others; in his family, considering his family it is perhaps good luck that ichor is so weak in his blood. It would have been lucky, if it hadn't been Ares' ichor that had reacted to the super soldier serum, breeding a Hulk out of one of the god's puniest sons.

Pain and a green rage monster will be his inheritance, all of his knowledge scavenged for. He will make his own educated guesses, but never come close to the truth.

  
_**ii**_ It is wrong to say that all of Ares' children are senseless brutes. All of them had a taste for violence, a hunger in their bones that longed to maim and fight. How they went about taming this violent delights varied. Clarisse LaRue bullied and ached and learned. Peggy Carter wore army uniforms when there weren't any tailored for women and put a fist or a bullet or an indisputable victory the face of anyone that doubted her place in the front lines.

Bruce Banner hid the anger better, tamed it and honed it. It was a misdgustment and sheer blindness to think that he could ever eradicate it. He kept to his books, nursed his bruises while dissecting frogs and simmered his resentment on bunsen burners. He wore gloves in military labs to hide the scabs on his knuckles. He hunched his shoulders and spoke soft-as-iron facts. People thought that he was shy, but Bruce noticed how others went quiet and leaned closer when he spoke, and he knew better than to overuse this weapon.

He was arrogant. All Children of War are, either warriors or physicists. The possibility of failure was terrifying. He trod on it ruthlessly, challenged it with each new incredible discovery and reckless experiment. He would have continued like that for a long time, if his illusion of invincibility hadn't come to bite him in the ass.

  
**iii** The secret to being calm is to always be angry. Paradoxical somewhat, but true. If you are angry all the time additional stimulus can't do much to the regular white noise of rage. No one notices that about him, because Bruce is careful with his limits, because Doctor Banner is quiet and soft spoken and surely this meant he was kind, too. Men with eyes like his and glasses like his and sanitized, gloved hands like his were always kind, except in all the ways they weren't. People always want to trust doctors: Dr Who teaches him that, and experience proves the hypotheses right.

Bruce pretends he's thrustworty so well he manages to fool himself, too.

 **iv** The Hulk helps, in a twisted way. He is a separate identity to Bruce's, almost, made of all the anger that he felt but never acted upon, engorged and made mighty. It was easier to act as a person and not as a monster when there was a clear cut division between the body of one and the others. No one could mistook small Bruce for the terrible Hulk, and if one lived and breathed and seethed inside the other, then, no one had noticed it all these years. The only change now was that the monster had a name and a dozen government agencies on its tail.

Ross hunts him down relentlessly, furiously. Full of righteous fury and currupted purpose, and he is human, undeniably human, nothing divine or monstrous about him. 

 _ **v**_ Before being on the run, Bruce had only seen war on the television screen. Robert Bruce's puckered scars from Vietnam, too, but that hardly counted. There was a war there, in living with that terrible, human man, Bruce knew. but not one that was recorded.

It was very different from actual combat. The sound of bullets made the Hulk angry. Hungry, but Bruce preferred to deny that, preferred to deny a lot of things. He dodges bullets and carries wounded civilians to shabby hospitals, wages war against death by infection and bloodloss to the background noise of explosions.

The Hulk was always under his skin, always an inside battle to wage, always bolstering his strenght and stamina and instincts.  It kept him alive. It made him _feel_  alive, focus sharper than when he spent weeks slaving over microscopes. This wasn't entirely unlike that, but it wasn't very similar either. It was better and worse and so much more _tiring_. Bruce was so tired of hiding. In this, as in so many other ways, he and Hulk were identical. 

There would be no peace for either of them. In this, too, they were the same.

(The Invasion, Loki, the Avengers: there was no peace in that. But it was a motive, cause and righteous justification, and that was something. That was more than something.)

 

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi to me on [tumblr](http://searchingforserendipity25.tumblr.com)


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